


Saudade

by imsfire



Series: Ten songs, ten stories [5]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Cassian's family (mentioned), Character Study, Feels, Gen, Home, Homesickness, Lyra Erso (mentioned) - Freeform, Nostalgia, Saudade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 02:00:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12738735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: It makes no sense, that Hoth should make her homesick.It makes sense to him in a way, that Hoth feels like home.





	Saudade

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "Sodade" by Cesaria Evora.  
> Saudade/sodade (Portuguese/Cape Verde dialect), is one of those marvellous not-terribly-translatable words (I love words! All words, and especially words like this, that rise from the deeps of their native world-view and elude the determination of English to nail everything down in the BM and label it neatly). As far as I can work out, it's kind-of homesickness, kind-of nostalgia, mixed with both sorrow for personal loss and regret for a general lost golden age. What a wonderfully rich concept to encapsulate in a single word.  
> We don't seem to have an equivalent in English, which is bloody typical if you ask me. I think the Welsh hiraeth might be fairly close?

She’s never lived on an ice planet before; and truly, if she’s honest, Hoth is the worst.  It’s vile here, the last place she could have imagined trying to make a home.  So it makes no sense, that Hoth should make her homesick. 

It can’t be the soul-eating cold, the endless miles of blue-white tunnels, the weeklong blizzards.  None of that is even remotely familiar, much less dear to her.  Yet there’s something here that both warms her heart and saddens it at once; something that evokes every dream of belonging, and every hope for better times.  Is it Cassian?  But he _is_ her home; not some mournful echo of memory but here and real.  His company, his wild loyalty, his arms strong around her when she’s cold and tired.  Powerful beyond belief, and precious, but entirely new.  There’s no ghost of the past in that embrace.  Nothing to provoke these vivid homesick dreams.

Jyn’s dreams are very precise, and every one of them is set in her childhood home.  It means lying in tears sometimes when she wakes, her breathing ragged and her face wet, remembering playing ankle-deep in black mud with a toy in each hand, or running through long raggedy-green grass chasing Mama down a hillside.  But after months of dreaming about blood-soaked sand and Cassian sinking down by her side as his legs give way, these confused evocative memories of Lah’mu aren’t that bad.  She can bear it.  Only it makes no sense.

She looks out of the mouth of the main hangar one day, at another blizzard beginning, and remembers.

 _Come and look, darling, look!_   Her mother’s voice, full of excitement.  _It’s snowing!_

It had happened the second year they were there; waking up and running to the window as Lyra called her over, to find the sky emptying itself, slow-falling whiteness tumbling down onto their green fields.  The ground masked already, before it was even breakfast-time. 

That first day, the snowfall ceased in the afternoon and for a time the whole world was a flawless ivory, and although it was a sunless day there was light everywhere.  The pure light of a world renewed and made clean.

That’s Hoth.  This place where her home is, and her love.  Bone-white and strong, full of snow-light and hope.  That’s why it’s familiar. 

_It’s beautiful, mama._

**

It makes sense to him in a way, that Hoth feels like home.  It’s as cold as Fest, indeed far colder most of the time, and in a myriad visceral subliminal ways being cold feels natural.  Cassian needs a coat even indoors, his breath puffs white, he wears two pairs of thick knitted socks and darns them to prolong their lives.  He dresses in layers, undershirt, shirt, jumper, padded vest, scarf, parka; and for once no-one laughs at him, since they are all doing more or less the same. 

Well, sometimes Jyn laughs, when he’s undressing, and he makes a joke of the unavoidable striptease.

People on Hoth crowd together for warmth, unconsciously and unselfconsciously, at meetings and briefings, in the mess halls and the cantinas; just as people used to at home.  And outside, although it is white and not grey, there is the constant dense snow, descending like feathers or whirling like shredded starlight, lying crisp and compact underfoot, compressing into mile-deep glaciers over thousands of years; the sound and the feel of snow has a kindly familiarity. 

But when he remembers Fest, until now it’s always been with sadness.  Until now, whenever _home_ was used to mean a place rather than a cause, it has always been _the place where I lost everything_.  No good can come of remembering something so irreparably broken, so irrevocably painful.  And he’s tested himself, has been on plenty of other cold worlds that evoked not a single heartbeat of nostalgia.  He thought he had armoured himself against it.  He thought.  So why now, why here, this ache, this longing, this bittersweet _saudade_?

Fest was the one place where being outdoors in the cold and coming inside to warmth and a voice that knows your name, meant family; Mama and Papa at the table, Sofia in his mother’s lap, the little space-heater humming, a pot of soup on the hob.  Snow outside and strong arms to hold you inside meant safety and loyalty, and hope, and love. 

And that’s what he has now.  That’s Hoth.  That’s Hoth, and Jyn on Hoth.

_Mama, I’m home._


End file.
